Bush Turns First Veto Into Child's PlayWashington Post - 7-20-06The somber tone of President Bush's first veto was
somewhat betrayed by a little child's play at the White House. The
president was surrounded by two dozen children as he announced ...

Father Faouzi Elia
of Peoria told Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice that
Israel should turn its attack to Syria and leave Lebanon alone. ..Elia, pastor of the St. Sharbel Maronite Catholic Church, sat
in on individual meetings this week with Cheney, Rice and the national security
adviser to talk about the U.S. government's role in the Middle East conflict.

"More rockets were fired into Israel
today. Israel responded by bombing more targets inside Lebanon. Now there's talk
the U.S. might send some troops over there to help with border security. That's
when you know the people over there are in trouble, when they start asking our
advice on border security." --Jay Leno

"A lot of people were offended by
President Bush using a four-letter word at the G-8 Summit the other day. Were
you offended? I was more offended by the way he eats a buttered roll in front of
company." --Jay Leno

A senior Interior Department official was
awarded his own buffalo to hunt on a billionaire's ranch a month before
his office designated Houston as a port for exotic wildlife, a move that
benefited the ranch owner.

David P. Smith, was deputy assistant secretary
for fish, wildlife and parks

What should be more of a story is the difference in media response to these two
tragedies. Condit was hounded, accused of murder, vilified by the right-wing
echo chamber and eventually defeated in his bid for re-election. Scarborough,
may have suffered from some indignities, but nothing on the scale of what
happened to Condit and his family.

Jon

Only one newspaper in the entire country covered the
death of Joe Scarborough's aide from start to finish. That alone speaks volumes.

Subject: Joe Scarborough

Joe was a lousy US Congressman. I'm from his old district
and we still don't have a north 4 lane highway to evacuate from hurricanes that
we begged him for after hurricanes Erin and Opal. We have to drive to Mobile (70
miles west I65 and almost 300 miles to the east I75) to get the closet northern
super highway. Interstate 10 is slowed to a crawl trying to evacuate Pensacola.

He pumped up the military and played the good time Charlie role,
then quit.

I'd hate to see what would happen if the military had to evacuate
(Eglin, Hurlburt, Naval Air) NORTH via I10, in a national emergency.

Yeah, like you, Lisa, I know Scarborough country too well.

I hear ya but let's give Joe a break -
he was busy doing three things at once -- pulling down Bill Clinton's pants AND
in the middle of a messy divorce AND preparing his new wedding. No wonder he
quit Congress after he was re-elected, he was exhausted.

Subject: Conspiracy

The only conspiracy theory I see with this Joe guy, is that a
liberal media exists.

Don't check the casket. I know he's back. When I saw those lights
flickering out at La Guardia Airport yesterday and heard the eerie shrieks
and moans in the dark, broiling subway tunnels, I just knew it: Ken Lay's
alive! We can see his spirit in every flickering lightbulb from Kansas to
Queens as we head into America's annual Blackout season.

It wasn't always so. For decades, America had nearly the best, most
reliable electricity system on the planet and, though we grumbled,
electricity bills were among the planet's lowest. It was all thanks to
Franklin Roosevelt and the Public Utility Holding Company Act which
allowed for tough regulation of the power monopolies. They were told what
they could charge, the maximum profit they could take and -- what I think
about when the lights dim -- exactly how much they had to invest to keep
the juice flowing.

But then, in 1992, a Texas oil man, George H.W. Bush, ordered to evacuate
the White House by two-thirds of the US electorate, gave his Houston
crony, Ken Lay, a billion-dollar good-bye kiss: Bush's signature
authorizing deregulation of electricity.

But Lay's operation didn't pick up the really big bucks until after
December 21, 1994, when the Enron chief wrote to the incoming governor of
Texas, George W. Bush, asking the Governor-elect to grant him a special
wish for Christmas:

"The Public Utility Commission appointment is an extremely critical one.
We believe Pat Wood is best qualified…. Linda joins me in wishing you and
Laura and the whole family a joyous holiday. - Sincerely, Ken."

And Georgie-Boy granted Kenny-Boy's wish, appointing Wood and thereby
giving Texans an electricity regulator who stumped for Ken Lay's right to
earn unlimited profits without any obligation to keep the lights on. Thus,
by 1995, electricity deregulation had a foothold in the Lone Star state
that would spread nationwide like Dutch Elm Disease.

But, unsatisfied with excessive profits, Lay and his team went for
unconscionable profits, flickering the lights in California in the winter
of 2000. "Let poor Aunt Millie … use candles," said one of Lay's minions
as he deliberately schemed to engineer black-outs. When the public reacted
with anger, Bill Clinton, by a December 2000 executive order, ended
Enron's right to trade power. Lay's response was, that month, through a
lobbyist, to tell President-elect Bush to promote Lay's puppet regulator,
Wood, to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Kenny-Boy wished it,
and again, Georgie-Boy granted it.

Lay's hand-picked federal regulator Wood then kept the game going until,
on August 14, 2003, the entire northeast, from Ohio to New York, went
dark. Wood had to take the blame and resigned. Bush replaced him with Joe
Kelliher, a regulator nominated by -- no points for guessing -- Ken Lay.

In the old, pre-Ken days of regulation, my fellow economists used to
complain about something called the Averch-Johnson Effect. The A-J Effect
was the result of regulations which gave companies incentives to gold
plate the electricity system, making it way TOO reliable. Too much cash
was spent on keeping the lights on.

Well, gone are the days of the A-J effect. The gold-plating is gone -- but
not the gold. Under regulation, power sellers were limited by law to a
profit of about 9%, what the law called a just and reasonable return. Now,
the profits can be -- and are -- unreasonable, unjust and just out of
sight.

For example, one company, Entergy, owns a nuclear plant in New York
called, Indian Point. They get to charge for nuclear power as if it were
produced by oil -- that is, they charge New York City residents at a price
effectively set by OPEC, prices boosted by the war in Iraq. Not
surprisingly, Entergy today reported a record rake-in of profits from
their nuclear business. No 9% limit for these good old boys. On top of
that, the power company is relieved of all obligations to keep the lights
on in New York City.

… And in New Orleans. The same company supplies all of the electricity in
the City that Care Forgot. Under deregulation, they hadn't gold-plated the
system; they hadn't even water-proofed it. Last year, when the levees
burst and the city flooded, Entergy simply turned off the lights and
declared their New Orleans subsidiary bankrupt. Leaving New Orleans in the
dark was a profitable decision. The company reported a 23% leap in
earnings for the third quarter of 2005, the period including Hurricane
Katrina, a profit boost they attributed to "the weather." Hey, are these
guys droll, or what?

This year, Entergy's profits have stayed up in the clouds, no doubt helped
by the cash the company saved by not bothering to restore electricity to a
large number of their customers in New Orleans --who remain in the dark
even today.

By now, you've got to ask: after the profiteering from Katrina, after the
California power scandal of 2000, after the Great Black-out of 2003, even
after the hand-cuffing of Ken Lay, why are we still under a deregulation
regime that Ken Lay seems to rule from the grave? Why is it that we're
still at the mercy of power vampires?

The answer, in part, is that the bloodsucking is a bi-partisan feast.
Entergy, the New Orleans nuclear company, is well defended in the US
Senate by their former lawyer, Hillary Rodham, who now protects them under
her new alias, Senator Clinton.

Ken Lay's gone, but the ghost of Ken Lay -- the marauding ghoul called
deregulation -- stays to haunt us.

**********For more on Ken Lay, Entergy, New Orleans and the politics of
power, read Greg Palast's just-released New York Times bestseller, "ARMED
MADHOUSE: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats Bush Sinks, the Scheme
to Steal '08, No Child's Behind Left and other Dispatches from the Front
Lines of the Class War." (Penguin Dutton 2006.)

Palast is also co-author of a treatise on the power industry, "Regulation
and Democracy" with Jerrold Oppenheim and Theo MacGregor (United Nations
ILO 2000/Pluto UK 2002).

"White House press secretary Tony Snow
says that when President Bush was told he was recorded saying a four-letter
word, he rolled his eyes and laughed it off, which is ironic. Bush is now
reacting to himself the way everybody else does." --Jay Leno

American officials are always wary of being spied on
when they come to Russia. But on this visit, officials said they had very little
doubt that their suspicions were correct: the attic and basement of Mr. Bush’s
“cottage” were sealed off from him and his security detail.

"The situation in the Mideast is not
looking good. Yesterday Vice President Dick Cheney said when it comes to war,
Americans need to know where he stands. I don't even know where he stands with
those seven deferments. I think it's near the back." --Jay Leno